Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Hoots for Shoots, making of an ant murderer - QQ Ep 17

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

So hello again, welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. This is the show where two comedy writers and best friends, forced apart geographically by dramatic circumstances, decided they wanted to keep in touch and continue asking and answering each other questions, so they invented the medium of podcast. How do you feel about that? Yeah, how do you all like it? Are you happy with this new thing we're doing? Other people should try it.

Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's not good, but it's a thing one could do. I am the Daniel half of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, and with me as always is my co-host and best friend, Soren. How do you go when you make noise with your mouth? Yeah, it goes a little something like this. So, I'm Soren Bui, everybody. Welcome to the podcast.

It's really nice to meet all of you. Yeah, and we are also always joined yeah it goes a little something like this so i'm soaring buoy everybody welcome to the podcast it's really nice to meet all of you yeah and we are also always joined by our cfo bacon i tried man i really tried yeah no i know i was gonna jump in and say bacon also because i felt like you guys reprimanded me last time for using my uh your real familial name sure i even heard dan's lips purse like he was gonna do an m and then just like it forced its way out bacon but as always we're quick question we're gonna talk to you about a bunch of things today we're gonna talk about movies we're gonna talk about sports we're gonna talk about phone. We're going to talk about sports. We're going to talk about phone calls. We're going to do all of those things. But as always, we'd like to thank you, our listeners,

who are quick and Quora's infinite playlist. So does anyone need that dissected at all or no? I mean, I get it. I'm just thinking if there's a better option. No, there's not. There's not. And here's why it's great. Because Quora is also the name of a website where you ask questions.

So that's a tie-in. And it's also timely because the writer of that movie just came out with a new movie called Hustlers. And I just saw it. It makes it timely because I saw it. How is it? It's really good. It's super fun jennifer lopez is an icon constant woo is constance woo is a is a star i don't watch fresh off the boat and i haven't seen crazy rich asians yet so this is the first thing i've seen with her and uh just really delightful dan you should definitely if i know my dan you're gonna like

crazy rich asians um you should have like a beer or two and then just cry like multiple times during it and then feel very inspired afterwards okay that sounds good i watched it i don't remember crying at all bacon grow up zorn no i think it's the other way i don't think you get to say that at any rate we like to call out one of these quick and quaris infinite playlist reviews every week to read on air and as usual i've printed out a bunch of reviews and i put one each in a different otherwise empty balloon that is attached to the top of like one of those uh ceramic carnival clown things, like a carnival. And I've invited the Stranger Things kids to compete by shooting water into the mouths of the clowns.

And whichever balloon pops first, the review contained therein is the one I'm going to read. Seems like you didn't need all the kids for that. But I don't want to tell you to do your job. But they're here. You get a price break after like the fourth kid. Let me just say it quickly. It's like hot dogs at 7-Eleven. You just got to do it for the deal. It's very exciting that they're here. You get a price break after the fourth kid. Let me just say it quickly. It's like hot dogs at 7-Eleven.

You just got to do it for the deal. It's very exciting that they're there. Finn Wolfhard, I am a big fan. I like you a lot. And for Billy Joe, Maisie, what's her name? What's Eleven's name? Mildred Robert Brown. Yeah.

Hey, watch out for Drake. Got it. Okay, here we go. They're going to start. No clear standout in the beginning. These kids, I mean, all really bad. Finn Wolfhard, for all his indie cred and record collections, you can't shoot a water pistol to save your damn life.

Oh. Well, he's lost interest. Okay. This is going to take a minute. That's Caleb. Caleb, the one who plays Lucas. He won. He doesn't feel good about it.

And he shouldn't, but he won. So let me just get out of here, kids. Okay, they're gone. Let me get the review that was in there. Oh! Holy shit, it's five stars. It's a five-star review? It's a five-star review from a user by the name of nejnyy.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that nejny or anything like that, or if it's just a series of letters, but here it goes. I love listening to Soren and Dan ask and answer each other's questions because it reminds me of talking to my best friends a few years ago when we were together all the time and still conversation flowed so easily. Now that life is causing us to drift apart as we grow and evolve i'm a little scared that i'll lose those connections seeing the effort you're both putting in to maintain your friendship instead of letting it wither and stagnate inspires me to reach out to my friends and ask them anything i'm mildly curious about what a good sweet sincere

review yeah what they really open the door onto their life. Yeah. That also brings me to my first quick question for you. Quick question, Soren. Go ahead. Who do you get on the phone with? Because we're separated by 3,000 miles, by the whole dang country, and we don't necessarily get on the phone, but this is pretty

close. We're still catching up regularly, talking to each other. Who else do you have that that you feel like you can say i regularly get on the phone with this person and just talk just my parents and my father and mother-in-law too that's it and in those circumstances it's so that they can see ronan we get on facetime oh you don't talk to to uh your brother at all the real buoy i mean we've talked on the phone occasionally we really don't that's not how we communicate we do it through g chat pretty much

uh we just don't i don't know it's it's the same situation as like a my relationship with you where if you called me i'd be like what's the matter what is it so if we have pertinent details that we need to get to we'll be like okay so you're coming to visit me all right do you need a car seat that kind of stuff we'll talk on the phone for but otherwise like we wouldn't call each other after a broncos game and be like wow that was bad huh would you call him after like he just took a trip somewhere he wasn't going to visit you but he was like oh i'm gonna be in in in prague for for eight days and you do you call and find out how Prague was? No. No. Oh.

Maybe his birthday I would call, but no, I don't. His trips. Because he also, it's always that feeling of the person who's being called is always like, okay, yeah, I mean, it was good. We rented a car.

It was nice. You're like, okay, I don't know what to tell you. I don't want to talk on the phone. So we just don't do it. This will be a little bit shocking because DOB's devotees will recall that I'm famously terrible on the phone. But I, in the last few years, have made sure to make time for certain friends. I think I still genuinely hate the process of being on the phone,

but, uh, I think being a, when I was very far away from my brother, he would call every once in a while. And for years, every time he called, I'd just be like,

what, what's wrong? Yeah. What's going on? And he was like, no, I'm just what's new with, in your life.

And for a while, he was the only one that I got on the phone. Well, I talked to my mom once a week. And other than that, he was the only one that I would get on the phone with. And then the older I got, the more I just thought, yeah, the relationships that are important to you, you should try to maintain with a

phone call every once in a while. I don't know if that's an age thing or a contrarian thing because I don't, I like texting less and less as I get older, but I don't know. No, I mean, I agree with you that relationships crumble without it. It's the same way I'm sure that people were back before Alexander Graham Bell. They were like, you have to write letters. If you you don't write letters you don't know that person anymore and it's like these you can tell somebody as much as you can and every four years or whatever it is that you see them but it's all these forgotten moments that separate you and you i think that

you it really is good for a relationship to be talking to somebody but i'm curious did your brother start actually getting interested in talking to you once he had a kid? Yeah. That's still, we still catch him all the time. No. I mean,

once he, before he had a kid, was he doing that too? Were you guys like, Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Uh, okay. Cause it really became more important to me when I had a child that I was like, okay, now I will call my brother or I will call my, my mom and my dad, or I'll call Coll brother or I will call my, uh, my mom and my dad, or I'll call Colleen's parents so that we can talk on the phone and they can see him.

That's that, that is nice. It's cool that you call your, your, your in-laws. Oh yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it's cool. Yeah. They're great. They're wonderful. Um, they're, we, I, I really lucked out because all pop culture tells you that they're no good. I really lucked out. Because all pop culture tells you they're no good. There's never been a good in-law. No. Let me... Bacon, you strike me as a phone call guy.

Yeah, I talk a lot on the phone. I think the same as you guys to my parents and my brother quite a bit. But I don't mind hopping on the phone for a good 45-minute catch-up. I just don't do a lot of four-minute calls unless they're utilitarian, but I like getting on the phone with an old college friend or something like that

and pretending like we're hanging out a little bit. Are there pauses? That's a good articulation for how I use the phone. That's why I'm angry when I get an unexpected phone call, and I feel like if there's information to give me, just text it to me. But that's the four-minute phone call. But yeah, I like the 45-minute to an hour phone call where it's just, this is the next part of my day.

This is a person that I know in Los Angeles that I want want to keep tabs on and instagram is not enough for that i just feel like there's so you had something yeah it feels like there's so much pressure on you in a phone call because the only thing is is talking whereas if you see that person you know you're going and you're going to do something together you're going to get food or you're going to see a movie or whatever it is or you can even go for a walk or a drive like at least then there's other things to occupy you when there's the downtimes on a phone call. I remember how horrifying it was when I was a kid and I was on the phone with a girl that I liked. And we, all of a sudden we ran out of shit to talk about. And both of us thought this is the

longest silence there's ever been. Somebody say something. Well, I'm not calling crushes. I'm calling people to genuinely be like how is like how's work what's new what what what has been going on and it doesn't i don't know i don't feel that pressure it doesn't need that the answer doesn't need to be big and dramatic i don't always call when i have dramatic news it's normally just like this is what here's how i feel about new york in the fall here's here's what's new with with my dog uh no i'm not dating anyone like these are the updates that i give when i call my close friends so you're friends with people you don't want to sleep with interesting okay okay

i i do think it's really funny though because anytime i've ever like watched uh like any like civil war documentary or read a book the the like update letters that people send to each other are generally so like eloquently written and very thought out and um they have like almost like a narrative structure sometimes and I'm using phone calls in the same way that I think they were using letters that like every like six weeks I'll catch up with someone and I it's like you know like bullshit improv like stream of consciousness that I'm trying to figure out as we're going and it's fine like you're friends with someone but there's a pretty stark contrast to being able to like articulate your thoughts and you know letter but even if it's not um profound or even if it's just improv or stream of consciousness bullshit,

I think the main key to it is establishing with someone, we are going to do this because I want to maintain this relationship. I think that's more important than often what gets said in a conversation. You're just like, I'm walking my dog right now.

We're going to talk for a half an hour. Neither of us have since gotten engaged or suffered a major injury since the last time we talked. So there's not going to be any huge revelations brought out. But it's important to remember that we're doing this because this relationship matters. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, I'm on board with it again i like the idea of it i mean just the and just being in that situation with somebody that you're comfortable enough with them to just shoot the shit and know that there are going to be these pauses and that's okay and it is sort of this it's just stream of consciousness and someone that's going to be bullshit it's going to be dumb so it's not going to be fun to talk about so you just move on to something else like having that comfort with somebody is what a friendship is yeah um i wonder if you guys have this i have a a couple of friends that i still like oh same um i still like very like love very dearly and you don't sleep with them huh no no it's like

all your friends you honestly with handshake friends um and they uh we like keep inviting each other to stuff and i don't think we do all the same stuff anymore and also like time is very limited so we don't i i probably go to like five percent of the things they invite me to i think they do the same for stuff i invite them to but i would be like very hurt if they stopped inviting me to them or they had other people uh reach out about that just because i think that's also another tie i have i'm like oh i know this guy's doing this guy's doing this on saturday he can't like he's not getting this thing but i think people have stopped inviting me into things that's one of the products of having a child too is that people are like no i can't fucking come all right that's not true soren i invite you to all kinds of concerts and stuff out here in new

york you've never once seen the statue of liberty with me that's true um i'm gonna i have you i've sort of figured out a way to mute you through my feed um dan i do have a quick question for you though oh go ahead are we on this isn't i allowed to do one now yeah okay uh i don't know i don't know what the equivalent would be for you um when you were in la though you would drive a lot and occasionally people would cut you off or they would make some dumb decision in front of you when somebody somebody really, really threatened your life by accident and was just very cavalier about it because they weren't paying attention while they were driving, was it super important to you to see that person's face? It was. And I do want to add that it doesn't even need to be a life-threatening thing. It could just

be something that is a minor inconvenience or something that I know is, is wrong. Like you did the wrong thing. It's still very important for me to see who that is. And it's, that's a complicated desire because I don't know what I'm going to do with that information. There's like, I, I'm not going to look at someone and be like, I knew it based on what they look like. It's, it's just, but it's still information that i need to

like log for my mental files which like this person wasn't looking and they didn't use their turn signal and they they very dangerously merged into this lane and if it wasn't for me if i wasn't as vigilant there would be an accident here today uh and i need to know exactly what they look like okay got it good yeah i'm not even trying to make eye contact with these people this must be a more universal thing that i mean i don't care if they know that i know they fucked up i just need to see the face of a person who did this thing right and i don't know what where that comes from because you're right i have no info there's nothing i'm going to do with that information other than right and you're not trying to confirm a specific preconceived feeling you're not like i bet this is one of those people that wears hats and green shirts like there's like i'm

not looking to to have a bias of mine confirmed in any way uh but it's still important to me for reasons that aren't clear i i maybe it's just like putting a face to to something you hate to somebody who's wronged you i feel like that's it because i i get the same that same visceral reaction where i'm angry and i need to see it when uh so my house was burglarized once and before that point i was sort of i moved into a neighborhood that wasn't particularly nice but it was like it was on it was was up and coming and it was it had a couple of problems but early on I kept like anticipating that something might happen and I was it was always kind of on the edge of my seat about it and like every night I would wake up to noises and things and be like oh that this is it this is it

and so when it finally happened it was almost like it was a relief like that it finally that something actually happened because i was like okay now i can i can contextualize it and like i really my neighbor had a camera and i was so desperate to see this person's face and we do actually see the person in the video but you can't see their face really and so i'm just like i had the image in my mind of what bad is like what this person is but it's not i don't get their actual face and it was very unsatisfying for me and now i've got uh it's it's late summer in los angeles where it's very temperate and a lot of animals love to live i've got pests i've got pests in my house i've got there was a rat in my attic i caught that thing but now there's

something else living underneath my house. And there's ants. And the thing that's living under... Fucking Argentine ants? Yeah. Yeah. But I'll tell you, the Argentine ants, they're these little tiny ones. If anybody doesn't know or doesn't live in California or wherever these places, these

things have invaded. Oh, also in Canada and in England. It's one of the other... One of the only global mega colonies beyond human race. They're killing all the other ants. They're a nightmare, and they're so tiny and hard to spot. But they were in my kitchen, and I was so furious about it, and I was trying to figure out how they're getting in and blocking it off.

And I was also having this sort of moral quandary with having to kill so many things every single morning. I would just wake up in the morning and kill thousands of them because they find something new way in and some new way to the cupboards or like the honey or into my dishwasher or whatever it was and uh finally i just like gave myself permission to kill and it was just this release this release came over me where i was like i you know what i look i gotta get these things out these things have wronged me. And then at that point, it turned into this hatred where I needed to know where they lived.

And I finally got a Breaking Bad suit, basically, and crawled underneath my house in the crawl space where it's dusty and cobwebby and gross and full of the ancient shits of possums from 100 years ago. And I found their nest. i i've never been more excited i mean like i don't think i was this excited when my son was born i started digging into this nest and pouring bleach into the hole like digging in finding the the eggs and like these ants are all over me and getting in the suit and i'm just in ecstasy because i found their fucking home and i can kill them all okay so there's a lot there uh-huh one they're gonna come back yeah do you know they're gonna

come back they're a problem that is too big for us to destroy at this point yeah so you should you should i mean not to take anything away from that but uh to connect this would you to being wronged in traffic i just what i'm saying is i need to kill the person who did it okay yeah all right so if anyone at home was connecting the dots before that i need to see their face so that i can find them and kill right know your enemy follow them home and destroy them in their beds where they sleep yes you know it wasn't even the killing that was as gratifying. The killing wasn't as gratifying as finding. Finding that nest and seeing it and knowing, ah, here it is, proof that I've been wronged.

Right. Here is the source of all this frustration and agony right now. Yes. Okay. Dan, I've got this new development in our house where in our laundry room a cricket has come in and crickets crickets are cool yeah um it's not i don't think he's bad but he's like making cricket noises every time it's the evening and i'm not in the laundry room and every time i step into the laundry room he has some sense about to stop making cricket noises.

Yeah, he's a sharp guy. I've walked into the laundry room to try and hear where he is like probably 200 times in the last three nights where I just keep being like, well, this is the time. I'm going to see him this time. That would drive me mad. That would make me so angry. That feels personal. i have like lost my

mind because i just want to hear what direction of the room he's in as soon as you see him you're gonna feel so much better he could probably stay once you just like see those little antennae you could be like oh there you are you little fucker all right it's logged up here sucker you're logged up here i've got an image of you in my brain. Have we talked about my relationship with ants on this podcast before? I don't think we have. Because those Argentinian ants, or Argentine ants, they're a huge problem throughout Southern California. This will sound dangerously like anti-immigration rhetoric, but they don't belong here. They snuck aboard boats and they came here and they're infiltrating.

I'm very pro immigration this is just these particular breed of ants are evil they came here and they and they came here illegally i mean you're fine with the ones that come here legally get in line i'm saying do it the right way uh these are jokes folks uh showed up in like southern california deserts and first wiped out one species of ants that was native to the area. And then as a result of those ants dying off, a bunch of lizards that ate those larger ants that died, those lizards died off. And the Argentinian ants just don't give a shit. They're just spreading.

lizards died off and the argentinian ants just don't give a shit they're just spreading and it's a rare species a rare type of thing that like when it meets other argentinian ants it's immediately one colony they don't like war with each other like most uh different genusist species of of insects do i don't know i don't know the words. But the point is they're like a giant, massive, continent-spanning colony that is destroying life around it. And most importantly, they were in one of my old apartments in Los Angeles and making things very inconvenient for me. And Bacon, I understand going into your laundry room 200 times in a week because my life in my old apartment just eventually revolved around finding and killing these ants. I had a variety of exterminators around and I had different kind of poisons to wipe them out because they were just everywhere. And I kept a clean apartment, but it didn them out because they were just everywhere and i kept kept a clean

apartment but it didn't matter because they don't care they just they just want to spread and be terrible and i it reached a point towards the end of that place and like the ants were the reason that i moved because towards the end i was keeping i was no longer cooking because i didn't want to have anything that smelled good in my apartment to attract more ants. Uh, I kept my silverware in my refrigerator because the ants couldn't get into the refrigerator. And sometimes they would be like, I found them once in my silverware drawer. So I was like, well, that's not safe. So I just had no food around and wasn't cooking and everything was locked up in my fucking fridge. And apart from that, I would be sitting and watching TV and every five minutes 10 minutes 15

minutes whatever it was a thing would go off in my brain that was like check for the ants and then i would go to every place that i'd ever seen ants before in my apartment and try to find them and if i found them i'd kill them and if i didn't i would sit back down and like wait another five minutes and go find more ants it's very like dangerously compulsive behavior that made me feel like an insane person like sometimes i would wake up in the middle of the night and be like ant check go check checking in the shower we saw them in the shower one time and just just like kill them to confirm that the ants were there and if they weren't there i i wasn't satisfied i just thought no they're somewhere else now right they've moved on to no way they'll they'll be back later yeah it was like truly a crazy time in my life i had a buddy i don't know if you went through something similar but he had a

a rat in his house that was going into his bathroom that they had spotted and they had multiple exterminators couldn't couldn't get the. And eventually they set up a camera. And I'm on a group thread with this guy. And I watched him descend into almost true madness because he wasn't sleeping anymore. He would wake up in the middle of the night and just watch the rat and then go to the bathroom and the rat would be hidden somewhere. and the rat would be hidden somewhere or a couple of times he had this like endorphin rush of that he came in while the rat was still there and tried to like hit it with a broom and it escaped and went back and do its thing and so he knew like getting the rat was a possibility and so he would just be like instead of sleeping with his family he would be like awake watching a night vision

camera with a broom next to his bed for like a three week period i get it i i'll tell you i there was a time we lived in an apartment down in santa monica and we got bed bugs once and i apparently don't have any sort of reaction to them i don't get anything from the bites so i could have bed bugs and never know it but my wife is horribly allergic and so her legs swell up like she's got hives when she gets bit by these things and we didn't know what they were at first we just knew she was getting bit by something and it was driving us fucking nuts because you every single night we're looking around hunting in the sheets we're waking up at three in the morning because we heard the bed bugs come out really that's when everyone's

in their deepest sleep so we're setting alarms to get up turn on all the lights and just hunt through the bed for these tiny little things and all you want to do like like you don't want to have bed bugs but you also really really want to see one because you just need to confirm that you're not a crazy person right and like we're just hunting for them and when i finally found one it was the same kind of elation where i was like yes yeah we got bed bugs oh thank god i got a thing similar to that where I have this, I don't know that I've ever talked about this publicly, but I have this thing that you know where my brain invents smells that aren't there. Yeah.

It's, I don't know the pronunciation of it, it's phantosmia or phantasmia, but it just, there's like six specific sc that um my brain will just manifest in in times of stress and and their scents that are common to everybody who has this condition and it's it's they're all bad it's it's like corpses and and feces and and urine and and vomit and rotting unpleasantries. And you don't get like a phantom flower. No, it's not like, Oh,

someone cooking sugar again. Hey, now cooking sugar is a good smell to everyone, right? It is. Yeah. It smells like marshmallows. Yeah.

It's very pleasant. No, it's only these, these terrible ones. And I, I live with it now and I'm fine, but they were for, for so long when I'm fine, but for so long, when I didn't realize it was a thing,

I would just constantly clean my apartment and was really hoping against hopes that I would impossibly open a kitchen drawer and find a rotting severed hand in there that I'd be like, oh, that's what it is. Oh, thank God. Closed that drawer, another mystery solved. solved yeah because even though you're expecting the worst or something horrible

you know what kind of emotional focus to dedicate to it now at least yeah and like when you don't have that you're just flying blind and it will i think that that's how people go crazy yeah which you know i'm also kind of fine with there fine with. There's been times like when I was dealing with the ants or dealing with various scents where I just thought, I guess I'm going crazy. Well, it's good that I know I can get ahead of this thing. That silence made me feel like that was not as universal. If I thought I was going crazy, I think I'd be pretty worried. No, but even if you knew about it before anyone else, you wouldn't feel a little bit better about it? I mean, I guess so. It's the same sort of thing.

The emotional focus, you know what to dedicate to it. But still, if I can't trust my own brain, how do I really know I'm going crazy? Well, you write a letter that says, Dear anyone, if you find this, I've lost my mind. Don't trust my own brain how do I really know I'm going crazy well you write a letter that says dear anyone if you find this I've lost my mind don't trust the things that I say you pin it to your shirt and then you walk around until you know someone gets alerted

to your behavior this is Dan in the Bahamas face down full like 20 miles an hour walk classic relaxing uh let's see if i can shift gears because one of the things that i like about doing this podcast with soren is that him being a father and homeowner and aunt murderer uh takes him away from the internet and things that the internet

talks about. And I spend so much time on the internet and I'm just always curious to interact with people who don't live their life on the internet like I do. So I'm gonna I'm gonna start with two words. Can we make this our game? Yeah, it's a game.

No, it's not. It's a different game. Oh, okay. I'm gonna start with two words, and then I'm going to expand it into a sentence, and then I'm going to give you another sentence, and we're going to see how long it takes you to know what the fuck I'm talking about, to connect this to anything that you might understand. Okay, great. Okay. So, here are two words. Mm-hmm.

Pencil store. Does that mean anything to you at all? Yeah. Somebody tweeted about a pencil store the other day. Okay. They said, I want to know... What did they say? They said, I want to know some woman's names version of new york not boo this

person's name uh version of new york at the pencil store that's all you got that's all i know okay what about this sentence does this sentence connect with you at all it was spring person's name graduated i got a day job harvesting lettuce on top of the goannas whole foods it sounds like some fake mcsweeney's thing where they're making fun of some hipster it's totally real and they're both from the same story uh i wonder if i can if there's anything else to connect this to no so there's this story that was all over the internet, uh, there was, oh god, I love how much you're gonna hate every aspect of this, so there was a, an Instagram influencer named Carolyn Calloway, who is 27 years old, and she

has been, uh, famous on Instagram with, with with as of now about 800 000 followers on instagram and she just been living this seemingly very privileged life where she was just like i'm in cambridge now i'm in prague now i'm doing this i'm staying here and just like writing these captions that were very long about living your best life and being very positive and uh just you know fancy waspy bullshit and it was like a career she could she's making money doing that sort of it seemed like she'd come from money already and was doing sponsored content every once in a while but then she didn't want to do sponsored content anymore because it didn't seem like she was living her most authentic life so she started this uh she's gonna be she was going to do this conference where she would do this tour and come to your town and sell out theaters where she would like give talks

like her version of inspirational ted talks and she would give you a bunch of gifts as part of the reason for going to these things. And one of them was like this, like, mason jar filled with a bunch of custom-made bullshit. So this woman was going to give people a bunch of gifts, including, like, I'm going to put a bunch of custom stuff in mason jars and give them to you in your gift bag. In addition to this speech that I'm giving at this this talk this conference that costs a lot of money for you to go to uh and then a couple of things after that one she didn't contact any of the venues that she was selling tickets to and two she started selling tickets before she had anything yes absolutely

book like msg not msg which is like just like just name dropped a bunch of venues and people were like yeah i'll give you money for that and that was falling apart because she didn't contact the venues b she was instagramming pictures of her in her apartment surrounded by like thousands of mason jars that she'd ordered and was like i didn't know how much room mason jars took up my whole apartment of mason jars that she'd ordered and was like, I didn't know how much room mason jars took up. My whole apartment is mason jars now help me. And three, she started telling everybody,

look, if you expected this conference to be good, I'll give you your money back. I don't know what I'm doing. I was just going to talk and be like authentic and joyful and, and helpful. So it was like very much like a fire festival scam type thing that we all got to to watch unfold in real time just this uh very bad scammer just like not even not even close to good just bad because it doesn't sound like she even

knew she was scamming no she thought she was providing something but the reason that we're talking about this now more than we were before is that uh this woman natalie beach wrote this article for the cut that came out last week that she part of it is detailing what seems like a very toxic and complicated relationship with carolyn calloway and the other part of it is her coming out to say i was carolyn's ghostwriter and by that she means they had co-written the instagram captions for carolyn calloway for years and natalie had been silent this whole time and in addition to the instagram captions they'd also uh co-written a book proposal together which sold for $375,000.

Okay. And then by the end of that, Carolyn was like, I'm returning this money also because I can't write this book. Holy shit. Yeah. Go ahead. I had a terrible visceral reaction

when you said ghostwriting her Instagram posts. Yes. One of those, because Carolyn, when she saw the article, Carolyn also, by the way, here's, we're gonna get into a conspiracy theory in a little bit, but before the article on the cut came out, Carolyn was saying on Instagram every day, an article is coming out about me. Read it. Natalie Beach and I have not spoken in years, I still love her very much, she's my ex-best friend, she's such a phenomenal writer, I don't know what this is gonna say, but just like, definitely read it and support Natalie,

and she was just, and then, uh, days later would be like, why isn't the article out yet, what's going on, why isn't the, why isn't the cut sharing it yet so she was clearly building hype to this article that was supposed to be like an attack on her essentially this big revelatory piece yeah about her life and she continued to like praise natalie's writing even after the article came out which brings me to my conspiracy theory that they are in cahoots that this is still part of a scam that they couldn't sell the book because the book was just going to be like her guide to life her guide to being a woman who says yes to things and travels and lives her best life that book fell apart because writing is uh hard and now i feel like they've got a more dramatic story in the breakup

of this strange, very specifically New York millennial friendship with social media that someone is going to snatch it up if it goes viral, which it has a good chance of going viral because it's the cut and it's this woman with 800,000 Instagram followers hyping up an article for two weeks before it comes out. And then someone's going to snatch this up and be like, let's do the documentary of this or let's do the movie version of this. So you think that this is a new thing that they figured out? Yeah.

I'm team cahoots. Do you have any examples? You may not have any of these. Any examples of the things that she was ghostwriting? Thank you very much. Soren, I do. Once she read the article, went on Instagram and started

reposting all of her old Instagram photos that were co-written with or ghostwritten by Natalie. Carolyn did. Carolyn is trying to be completely above board about like, look, these are the ones that I wrote. These are the ones that she wrote. And these are the ones that we wrote. And some of the captions for the ones that are under the category of we wrote include the caption whoa that's it are you shitting me wait what's going on in the photo do you know uh she's just in europe somewhere it's not like there's not a horse involved or

anything okay give me another one uh fuck i don't have another one at the ready but they're all things like there are things that certainly don't uh don't require a co-writer yeah whatsoever uh they're also like they're long but they're they're they're still very basic captions and also this is this is one of the things that make it made it very alienating for me and made me want to quit the internet because i it's it's not the place where you and I cut our teeth as writers anymore, which is fine. That's the direction that time moves. But they talked so much of both Natalie's article and all of Carolyn's responses have been about how like, yeah, I'm a writer and Instagram is my medium for writing and it's not uncommon for

people to have ghostwriters. And this is just how I was telling my story. And there's a part of me that thinks maybe that is the future. Maybe people are writing their stories on Instagram. Uh, and there's another part of me that is like, no, that's for pictures of my dog.

What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. Fuck man. Like I don't want to believe that that's for pictures of my dog what the fuck are you talking about yeah fuck man like i don't want to believe that that's the future i guess like i understand sort of when somebody says that's my medium it's like you have it's a situation like we had where you have direct connection to your audience where like it's all kind of happening in real time that as soon as you write it it exists to somebody else and you get to see their response to it which is like a new way that that writing exists but these are they're just little captions on her like i'm assuming like her jumping off a rock and cork correct okay uh and the other strange part about this that became my favorite thing was was uh the reason that i brought up pencil store is is in Natalie's article about the horrible breakup

of their friendship. And I don't want to completely make all this sound sunny because I do think Natalie is a strong writer and she's mixing in this story of being a ghostwriter on an Instagram account while also having the realization that you're not the main character in your story. And not in the fun way that you say when your son becomes the main character, but just in a way where you get one of those friendships where your needs are clearly pushed to the backseat while she

played second fiddle to Carolyn. Andlyn and that's like handled in a very like real and and and uh heartbreaking way and also she's juxtaposing all of carolyn's wonderful experiences with like some truly traumatic stuff that's going on with her dating life at the same time is it well there are there are a lot of layers to it that make it a very interesting and complex story. But on a sunnier, wackier side of things is throughout the entire essay, Natalie is updating you with what her job was at the time, because she went to school because she wanted to be a writer, a journalist, and then was just picking up odd jobs throughout New York and just drops every one of them very casually. And it's like, so Carolyn was off in Cambridge dating this Swedish magnate of some kind. And I had just started landscaping in Bed-Stuy. And then later in the piece, that's the,

so it was spring. Carolyn graduated. I got a day job harvesting lettuce on top of Gowanus Whole Foods. And then later, by that time, Carolyn and I were no longer friends. I got work at a pencil store and told her via email that we were through. And we don't talk about the pencil store anymore. She's like, hold it. What's your resume at this point? It felt like a 30 Rock running gag. You decide this character has

weird jobs throughout their life let's check in what could be stranger than harvesting lettuce at a whole foods rooftop pencil store in los angeles yeah man it does the hearing that detail makes me think that you might be right that this is a that that this is a plan on their, both their parts that they orchestrated this because what she's selling is a movie basically like a, this is what it looks like at this point in my life because she's the main character of the cut piece. It sounds like like finally I'm the main character of this and she's giving you all that extraneous main character shit that you would get from a movie.

Yeah. And there are a couple of other uh details that really bring uh the cahoots conspiracy theory which which i've been calling uh it started out as cahoots and then cahoots for sure and then hoots for shoots so it's hashtag hoots for shoots and that's just what this conspiracy theory is called and you're all gonna have to deal with it so in accordance with hoots for shoots the other piece of evidence is that when the cut piece came out carolyn on instagram was a praising the writing b saying i know a bunch of editors in new york follow me so one of you should snatch up the rights to this book, hire Natalie

to write a book about this, and C, this is really great, she's a great writer, this is more of a work of art than it is a work of journalism, and it should be treated as such, and separate from all that, Natalie said the exact same thing, this is a work of art more than it is a work of journalism, and the specificity of that phrase being shared between the two of these people who allegedly have not spoken to each other in years gets my spider sense tingling a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we're gonna... It also absolves them from fact-checking from anyone. Right. This is uncharted territory for me, and it scares me when I see glimpses of it where there are people who are not afraid to be famous for being terrible. Like people who can raise their hand and be like, I've done some really terrible, dumb shit, and I've hurt a lot of people. Can I be famous?

And everyone's like, yeah, sure. Like, we'll talk about that. And like they're eager to jump into that role. I do. I would like to add just for for full transparency, this would be a rotten detail to leave out is that Carolyn claims that throughout the entirety of her friendship with Natalie, when she was behaving poorly, she was addicted to Adderall. I don't know if that's true. It's certainly what she said. It seems irresponsible for me to leave that information out. Yeah, that would certainly help to absolve her in a lot of people's minds, I would think. Yeah. Not mine.

No, me neither. Bacon? Weigh in. Do you think that drug addiction is a moral failing? Guys, I'm more like a light comedic touch different topics were you aware at all of this story the carolyn calloway natalie beach no i saw um i saw a bunch of people like um talking shit about pencil stores like it was in the context of like oh i, I had a harder job than

a pencil store. And like, you shouldn't feel bad about, um, or you shouldn't like, uh, get pity because you worked in a pencil store, but there's, this was one of those things that was, I could, I could feel that I was on the periphery of it. And I like, didn't have the the um like inspiration or energy to be like all right well i'm gonna like search hashtag pencil store and then just like fucking let's go i think that's healthy i think it's a it's a real just like test for certain people because we were talking about it at work and we were really split the the 10 writers half and half of who cares about this thing that's going on and who doesn't care about this thing and some of the writers were like is it this is a long article should i should i get into it is it one of the

one of the more entertaining scams and it's not as entertaining as fire festival and uh that uh theranos scam it's low-level scam by people who aren't as good at scamming and they might in fact be uh less like opportunistic scammers and more uh sociopaths yeah oh which made it interesting to me okay uh oh i saw something else um recently i want to know if this is tied together if this is uncomplicated different there i saw somebody post about what happened to the plate what happened to the to the yale plates oh yeah that's another part of this mystery is that um everything's falling into place carolyn calloway was uh super obsessed with with yale and I believe couldn't get into Yale. And Natalie Beach had family connections to Yale that she had these Yale plates

and gifted them to Carolyn. And then one day Carolyn said, my apartment was broken into and the plates were stolen. And Natalie was like, that's interesting. You have wildly expensive electronics devices and like credit cards and money in your place. Why did anyone take plates and then nothing else? And Karen was like, I don't know. And so now we just don't know where the plates are. But like, we

believe that this is part of some kind of lie or scam. So we just know that the plates are gone. some kind of lie or scam. So we just know that the plates are gone. We, no one can guess a motive for why Carolyn would lie about the plates or just like, I don't know, sell them or hide them

or whatever she did. It's just one of the, a stranger detail of this story that if you're on the conspiracy side of side of things if your team uh hoots for shoots then you you assume this is just uh a spicy detail that is placed like it's it's checkoff's gun really right right it's a thing that makes no sense in the current narrative uh but if carolyn or natalie wanted to get more attention for this sometime in the future they could just post i know where the plates are and that's

suddenly going to get everyone excited again because it's just like it's a very juicy detail of like this is a thing that allegedly was stolen that no one had any reason to steal and we can't guess any motive for it and it. And it's just one of those mysteries that gets the internet buzzing. You're right. I hate this. Yeah. But I don't know. It also feels like it could just be a red flag on a really unhealthy person who would say nothing can be their fault.

So maybe one of the plates broke. She didn't like having the... It was her favorite one of the set or whatever like didn't the set didn't go together so she threw the whole shit away and then her friend was like where are my plates and she's like what what makes this the least my fault and how can i just move on there's a type of people who just move from room to room and it's like the room they just left stopped existing behind them right like uh all right well i don't like her i i'm not sure i'm totally on board with natalie stop existing behind them. Right. All right. Well, I don't like her. I'm not sure I'm totally on board with Natalie either.

I guess I should read this piece. Yeah, there aren't really heroes in this. Am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to say that I don't trust these women? Well, that's another thing that I don't know because, and this is something that I need to dig into more and and talk to more women about is that just the idea of using instagram for storytelling uh is something that i balked at but to read what people are saying on the

internet that's a very specifically feminist and new approach to, to writing. So that's the thing that, that I could just be wrong about. And I, I, I don't know because even saying it out loud right now is, is,

uh, I, I, I feel lost because, because, because I fundamentally understand writing differently than that are they funny are like the captions funny no i don't get it i don't get it why don't you why don't you talk for a second while i while i track down some captions okay because i mean like with twitter i understand

i'm at a point in my life where i get how somebody from twitter can make a career out of being on twitter there would have been a time maybe even like seven years ago where I've been like, what are we what is everybody doing? The world's going crazy. How come you how can you hire anyone based on whatever happened to be that 160 characters? And now I get it because there is there's an art to crafting something that small. There's an art to crafting something that small, making it a big enough world that people are excited to read it, that they get it, and that they're going to laugh at it. There's a real art to making a one-liner, basically.

And I understand that now, but if these aren't jokes, if these are just sort of milquetoast, inspirational, sort of milquetoast inspirational uh cloying what adages like i i don't i don't get it i don't get how you can say i'm a writer from that i don't either but then when when i read from people that this is a a new form of writing that is that is uh giving power to a type of writer who was previously marginalized that's when i yeah i i started well then maybe you're you're not the maybe you just don't get it daniel and that and and that's and that's the truth but it's not for me i'm willing to accept that it's not for me there are there are some crucial details that i can't believe i left out soren But it's not for me. I'm willing to accept that. It's not for me. There are. There are some crucial details that I can't believe I left out, Soren.

And we're going to wrap this up soon. But. One of the things was after Carolyn had read the cut piece, she posted, in addition to posting on Instagram, all the captions that were written by her and written by Natalie. She posted a picture of Natalie when she was very young, and she previously hadn't posted a bunch of pictures of Natalie, like her face was always blurred because Natalie was not a public-facing person, and Carolyn was, and so she posted this one thing that was supposed to be like, I am so proud of Natalie for writing this, and this is also one where she's saying like, book editors, you gotta, gotta snatch her up, and she's so great. Also, I'm gonna publish a photo with Natalie's face in it, because she just gave an interview to the New York Times, where she

included a photo with both of our faces, so I'm going to finally share her face and she's got such beautiful green eyes. It is not a flattering photo. It's supremely shady. Is Caroline gorgeous in it? Caroline's not in it. Oh, I thought it was both of them. It's like a candid picture of a young woman with her like hand in a glass trying to get an ice cube out of a drink looking very much like she's not posing right now

second detail that i can't believe i forgot is uh after the article came out she was like i'm gonna have i have an interview this is carolyn i have an interview on, uh, MSNBC, I think to talk about this, to give my response. And then the day of the interview, she posted this. It's a picture. I'm going to describe it to you. It's an old picture. It's a, uh, man in a button down shirt and shorts with glasses. And there's a little girl who just like coming out of a pool, like, babe, like toddler girl who's reaching up. it's a very cute picture of a father and daughter the caption my um dot dot dot my dad just died today i got the call an hour ago the cause of death is unknown what

caroline's dad just died after this i have an interview with nbc news in 20 minutes and i don't know what to say i guess i'll just tell the truth i don't know i can't think straight text someone that you love them today i didn't know this would be the last time i ever texted my dad as if there wasn't enough drama in this story but also that you make that part of your public persona immediately that your first thought is, my fans will want to know. And this became an argument at work, too. Is it worse if she lied about her dad dying 20 minutes before her interview with NBC? Or is it worse that her dad did die and she's using that to draw more attention or spread more drama.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, Jesus. I mean, I don't even get it when people go on Facebook and they're like, hey, just want to let you all know my grandmother died last night. She meant a lot to me. Like, I don't know who you're telling that to, unless you have in your mind this preconceived idea that you have an audience.

And that's wild that she would, after getting that news, the first thing you do is turn to social media. Yeah. Dan. Before I find these social media accounts, you had said earlier that

you thought that people of color shouldn't be allowed to go as cowboys for Halloween could you elaborate on that yeah thank you Zoran I'm really glad that I have this space to answer that thing that I went on record I suppose I just think

that it's really there's two issues that i have with it in cowboy it's the it's the boy part can we just can we not in 2019 can they be cow people like honestly like like soren i'm asking you honestly can i be cow people and before you answer that i have another question that i need to ask you, honestly, uh, cow, also kind of gendered, no, because, like, isn't bowl a male cow, so isn't cow female cow, and so then wouldn't it be female gendered thing, boy gendered thing, so I'm just saying, uh, instead of cowboy, it could be animal people people and anyone can do it for halloween or any holiday you so deftly stumbled out of that noose dan well done well done all right uh you can

genuine question is uh our cows is that right when I said are cows female? cows are female cool absolutely okay you can follow us on Twitter any of us you can follow Daniel at dob underscore inc

you can follow me at soren underscore ltd you can follow Michael Schroer at make me bacon please spelled pls or you can follow quick question at qq underscore

soren and dan I noticed that it posted today that's the first time. I think maybe I just started following it. That might have been it. On Instagram? Come on. Or where?

No, on Twitter. You haven't been following us on Twitter? I mean, I am now. And so I definitely saw that a post went up today. You can email us at QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com. I'm not even going to do Instagram. You know what? I'm cutting this from these from now on.

We don't. We had a guy on Twitter say that that's his favorite part of the episode. Cause you guys are reading the Instagram. It's QQ underscore. Man, your taste sucks, idiot. Underscore Soren,

underscore and underscore Daniel. By the way, that hurts quite a bit to know that everything else that we put so much work into, that's the piece that you enjoy the most uh and you can also find or follow or hire our producer and sound engineer and editor vincent at silicone beach podcast.com we also have a patreon at page it's patreon backslash quick question yeah it is bye dan sorry i'm just seeing if i could find us on instagram tell your story there

that's maybe an opportunity